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The press release you called 'pompous' is one week old -- when the record energy hadn't yet been reached. Apparently going to CERN's front page is too much effort for slashdot's editors. Anyway, here's the current press release [web.cern.ch]

Wha? You mean physicists don't REALLY measure data in terms of books stacked up in a barn, and Germans don't use barns as libraries? I never would have guessed that I was actually just making a "How many Libraries of Congress is that?" joke!

Actually, the press release came out today when they reach 3.5 TeV, which is when they actually breached the space-time continuum, thus sending their PR department back in time one week resulting in this back-dated press release.

I'd explain it all to you, but we don't have time! Well, time is very relative. When it reaches 3.6 TeV, it will open a rift in time that will launch the entire planet back in time. Most likely none of us will ever remember it, so we'll let it happen over and over until...

Like I told you before, there haven't been Pterodactyls in this or any parallel universe for over 65 million years. This has already been proven through examining the far side of Einstein-Rosen bridges and exchanging information with our peers on on the other sides that we've discussed the matter.

Don't you remember the loop where the operations at Area 51 were made public. It did shut up the alien conspiracy folks, at least until the LHC got up to speed again at....

It took me a little bit to get your Lost reference.:) Once I got it though....

There is a wealth of fictional material that relates to infinite time loops. I think the story line has been going on for just about as long as we've had the concept of time travel being a valid plot element. Most of them involve the traveler as being the focus and the only one (or ones) aware of the loop. Here are a few that I can think off, off the top of my head, that are loops. I dug around

Ahh, that's a show I've been meaning to watch, but haven't successfully caught yet. Too much happens in real life, so I usually don't get to the TV until it's all infomercials. They're not quite as entertaining, unless you're looking for a flowbee, snuggle, shamwow, the exercise equipment of the week, a variety of diet aids to make you look like a model, and want to watch college girls getting drunk and naked.:)

I think I've seen this one. At one point, there's a time travel coffin in a storage unit, right?

The one I was referencing was out in the desert somewhere in the Southwest US. If I remember right, the time travel machine was somewhere in a cave, and there was at least a good guy (the protagonist), bad girl who was helping the good guy, a bad guy (antagonist) who was also either a serial killer or just had a rather angry streak and would kill anyone for any reason. The good gu

It's pretty outrageous calling the Director General's web update pompous. Someone clearly has an axe to grind. His web page seemed like quite a reasonable summary for the time it was posted. Part of his job is to promote the value of the billions of Euros being spent on CERN.

I'd say you were new around here (as kdawson is not known for his intellectual musings), but damn it Anonymous Coward, you've been posting here for longer than I have - so you should know better than to write crap like that.

Of course the correct way to do it would be to multiply the information of the LoC with k*T ln 2 where k = Boltzmann constant, T = temperature of the Library, ln 2 to change from base 2 logarithm (information entropy) to natural logarithm (thermodynamic entropy).

Let's take the 20 million volumes * 200 pages from your calculation, and assume 250 words per page [google.com], 4.5 letters per word [trincoll.edu] and 1.4 bits per letter [garykessler.net] (see directly above table 1, the value for longer text; I've taken the middle, rounded up). With this data, we get a total information content of the LoC of 6.3*10^12 bits. Let's further assume the temperature of LoC is about 290K, then we get the energy equivalent of the LoC as about 0.11 TeV.

ah, but Ballmer threw the chair across his office to hit a table. Using round numbers, assume a ballistic lob with starting height of 1 meter to peak of 2 meters high to table 5 meters away also of one meter height with 20kg Aeron chair in 10 m/s gravitational field. chair will fall that one meter vertically in sqrt((2d)/a) =~ 0.5 seconds, so up and down in 1 second. And that's the time the horizontal travel must take, so horizontal initial velocity is 5 m / second. Vertical initial velocity is a*t for

This is why I contend that no one ever dies (at least in their eyes). Ever have those dreams where you are killed? Seem very real? Then bam!! you wake up and it was just a fleeting memory while the memories of your current life start flooding in. Then up and into the shower.

Unfortunately, if you are riddled with cancer, society will not allow you to end your world line peacefully. They will instead force you to live through an extended world line of little value, filled with terrible suffering.

The Press Release tells me what they have achieved in terms of goals, and what goals they hope to achieve over the next year or so. On the other hand the all Status Ops tell me is whether or not the LHC was plugged in over the last 12 hours. Both datasets have their place and both tell me something that the other doesn't or can't.

362 MJ. But they're talking about the kinetic energy of the aircraft carrier, not the energy output of it's engines that is required to keep it at speed, so if the carrier in question is American, it would have the equivalent energy when it was moving at about 5 knots.

From the CMS e-commentary."..the beams were extremely stableduring this period and had a very long lifetime."

Yes, but only for about two minutes, then they were dumped because the protection system was acting up. That's a major PITA when running such machines. The protection system is overly sensitive and needs to be carefully tuned to safely detect "safe" conditions and only report minor deviations. Since it has never been run at that energy with beam it it, there are still a few things to sort out, which needs a bit of time (and a certain amount of trial and error). Well, better safe than sorry.

Does that make the collision 7 TeV? Serious question - I'm not sure I completely understand the physics. OK. I almost completely don't understand them. I have read that the LHC produced collisions of 14TeV, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt [wikipedia.org] and that the most energetic cosmic rays are 10^8 TeV. If all that it true, doesn't it completely and totally kill the whole "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit?

LHC physicist checking in - yes, that will make the collisions 7 TeV. Note that there are no collisions yet, we're still doing work to make sure that the beams are stable and focused properly. Once we have collisions, we'll run at this energy for about a year and a half before shutting down for a year to perform maintenance.

The LHC never produced 14 TeV collisions, the highest collision it will perform this year is 7 TeV. It is designed to produce 14 TeV collisions, and it will hopefully do that after we finish taking data at 7 TeV. It is true, however, that cosmic ray collisions completely kill the "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.

I think you'll find that if you get hit by the beams from the LHC, you won't have to worry about obesity or cancer. And the only black hole you'll notice is the one that is the entry into your body where it hit you.

In past and present colliders the luminosity culminates around L = 10^32c^-2 s^-1, in the LHC it will reach L = 10^34cm^-2 s^-1. This will be achieved by filling each of the two rings with 2835 bunches of 10^11 particles each.

Hey, maybe you could answer this question for me.. how much shielding do you think manned spacecraft need from galactic cosmic rays? I've heard people say that the best thing you can do with galactic comic radiation is let it hit you.. of course that's a little hard if you're already shielding for solar radiation.

If all that it true, doesn't it completely and totally kill the whole "LHC will destroy the world".

You are exactly right. And it’s the failure of every “expert” interviewed who didn’t mention this, and of course of the media hype machine, that that is not well known to everyone.Oh, and of course mostly to the loonies who want to stay ignorant.

and that the most energetic cosmic rays are 10^8 TeV.

To imagine this: Those particles are so fast that they have the mass of an apple or orange. A subatomic particle! This gives you some feeling for the power.And yes, that does mean that they create those tiny black holes all the time in our atmosphere.If this would create black holes, earth would have never existed.

And yes, that does mean that they create those tiny black holes all the time in our atmosphere.If this would create black holes, earth would have never existed.

Potentially, but we haven't yet proven that micro black holes can be created by particle collisions. If it turns out they can be created however, it would certainly imply that they are not a risk to the planet.

Potentially, but we haven't yet proven that micro black holes can be created by particle collisions. If it turns out they can be created however, [cosmic ray-created blackholes] would certainly imply that they are not a risk to the planet.

Maybe the core of the Earth *is* full of mini-blackholes and the Earth would be a few thousand miles larger in volume if not for them. We always assumed the weight was due to an iron core, but maybe it's mostly holes instead.

I highly doubt you'd feel an impact with a single particle regardless of it's momentum. It would just blow right through you like an X-Ray or gamma ray without you knowing, but potentially damaging some DNA on its way.

Requires some knowledge of the many worlds interpretation or the anthropic principle though.

Of course, according to MWI, you are killed all the time even without the LHC. After all, if it can happen, and be it with absurdly low probability, then it will happen in some world. There are worlds where the whole earth collapses into a black hole not because of some LHC experiment, but just due to an unusually large quantum fluctuation. There are worlds where is just happens that no oxygen molecule finds its way into your nose for several minutes, and you suffocate. There are worlds where the nucleons i

The whole text is based on the arrogant, ignorant and retarded Fermi “paradox”.It is arrogant and ignorant because it states that we don’t see any aliens, so there must be no aliens, so where is everybody?? Which is just as retarded as a blind man going “i don’t see humans, so there must be no humans, so where is everybody??”Or your doc going “There is no cure to this disease.”. When in reality he should say “I don’t know a cure to this disease.

Actually, this goes in steps. They went from ~1.18TeV (which was already the highest energy for a proton beam ever achieved in lab) to 3.5TeV. The experiments will run at 3.5TeV for some time, then another shutdown to get them to the design energy of 7TeV per beam (14 TeV per collision). All is happening as planned.

The "problems" you mention happened with every single collider, ever. When you get to a new scale, you expect things to happen differently from your original idea; so you plan to allow time to solve problems. The accelerator itself is an experiment, and one that is going very well.

You want hard results? ALICE [aliceinfo.cern.ch] published a science paper [arxiv.org] on collisions almost four months ago. You can see more from ALICE [stanford.edu], ATLAS [stanford.edu], CMS [stanford.edu] and LHCb [stanford.edu]. Lots of simulations, descriptions and detection methods, but at least the two "smaller" groups (LHCb and ALICE) have measurements already, at one sixth of the energy they were designed to work on. In fact, LHCb will only have actual b hadrons to see when they start colliding protons at 3.5TeV; but they still could find a meaningful result to publish, sooner than anticipated by anyone with even passing understanding of collider physics. Is that enough? Or do people actually believe things go like this [xkcd.com]?